Benjamin himself is the rare and welcome case of a protagonist I really like: a free man of color in New Orleans of the early 1830's, a classically trained pianist and sometime surgeon, a middle-aged widower still in grief-shock when the series begins, and a semi-stranger in the city of his youth, having spent the last sixteen years in Paris where being assaulted with impunity by white men with nothing better to do was significantly less of an environmental hazard and he did not need to carry papers to prove that he's no longer a slave. He's canonically very dark-skinned, six foot three, built like a brick shithouse. He scares a lot of white people just by walking down the street and has for survival reasons therefore become very good, very fast at looking like Just Another N-Word, Nothing to See Here, Move Along, unless he's appearing in his capacity as a musician or a music teacher, in which case it's Very Polite Black Man, the Nice Kind, Please Patronize. It's no surprise that he's furiously angry about much of the world he lives in, but I think it's wonderful that the narrative so thoroughly supports him. For similar reasons, I enjoy how carefully the series draws its positive white characters (there's, like, two in the regular cast) so as to avoid even an accidental case of white savior.

YES, yes yes to all this. How did I miss this? Pfui.

I am actively confused that these books were never adapted for any kind of television; they would be a magnificent showcase for a cast of primarily actors of color, most of them women.

It'd be really fucking perfect material for an HBO series. A bunch of them.